Colombian student Diego Gomez uploaded an academic paper to document-service Scribd a few years ago to share with his graduate school peers who, like him, studied biodiversity and amphibious animals.

When the author of the paper later found out about this, he decided to press criminal charges against Gomez last year. Due to Colombia's heavy-handed copyright laws (which are called rights of the author, or derecho de autorin Spanish), he could go to prison for up to eight years as well as face crippling monetary fines.

There may be nobody more committed to ensuring that the people have access to the law than rogue archivist, EFF client, and 2009 Pioneer Award winner Carl Malamud. This Friday, his latest campaign to free PACER culminates in a "polling place" at the Internet Archive in San Francisco, where he's encouraging people to come in and vote with their pens by writing to Chief Judge Thomas of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. This is all scheduled for May 1, which was designated in 1958 as "Law Day" by President Eisenhower.

Promising public access legislation FASTR (Fair Access to Science & Technology Research Act) has been re-introduced by a bipartisan coalition in Congress. Lawmakers now have an important opportunity to strengthen and expand rules that allow taxpayers to freely read articles resulting from research their tax dollars support. EFF continues to encourage legislators to pass this bill as an important step forward—though there are still some measures to improve.

It's been a mixed year for open access but we've seen some real victories and a steady march toward a comprehensive federal open access policy.

We entered January with a bad taste still in our mouth: the previous month, the academic publisher Reed Elsevier sent thousands of copyright takedown notices to researchers, universities, and scholarly startups that were all hosting the researchers' own works. In doing so, the lumbering giant alienated a significant swath of its readership—who also happen to be its content providers.

EFF proudly participated in the eighth annual Open Access Week last week, a celebration of making scholarly research immediately and freely available for people around the world to read, cite, and re-use.

We published multiple blog posts each day, including a post from our friends at Wikimedia and a letter from Colombian scientist, Diego Gomez, who is facing up to eight years in jail for sharing a scholarly article online. One theme that seemed to run across all blog posts was that open access doesn't exist in a vacuum: there are laws, policies, and happenings in the world that immensely affect our access to research. Copyright law, for example, not only bolsters the current closed access model of scholarship, but its particulars are becoming stricter as policies extend outside the United States. We encourage you to check out all the blog posts below.